The Future of American Democracy: Biden, Obama, or Bust

Media may want an internecine bloodbath inside the Democratic Party as democracy hangs from a cliff, but it won’t happen. It won’t happen because data and history point to only three likely outcomes.

ABOVE: A portrait of former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama.

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Introduction

American corporate media needs to stop.

It is arrogantly, unprofessionally, and even shamefully trying to shape the news it should be reporting on by demanding President Joe Biden’s head on a platter.

Yet despite the unseemliness of its conduct, corporate media may yet get its way.

The new statement from the President of the United States notwithstanding.

When major media wants to make something happen in America, even if it’s not the will of its viewers that it should happen, it’s well aware it can force the issue. It can do so just as easily by misreporting the news or by omitting key content, by reporting an accurate fact far more times than it deserves or by slanting its carefully molded pundit panels towards those with the view(s) it favors. It can grant anonymity to sources who haven’t earned it under the conventional principles of responsible reporting, or it can use “weasel words” to hide how many sources it has, how well-informed such sources are, what positions of power and/or influence they hold or have held, or even whether they’re in a position to actually know any of the things they say they do. As a longtime journalism professor (now retired) at an R1 public research university, I can tell you that journalists and their editors have a thousand little tricks they use to tweak your understanding of what you’ve read: everything from quoting the same source multiple times with language that would make a reader think they’re reading content from two or more discrete sources to something as simple as (a) failing to note a source who is offering self-interested pap or (b) failing to provide any alternative viewpoints at all.

The way we know that major media wants President Biden to end his presidential campaign—perhaps even resign the presidency—is not only that it’s using every tool at its disposal to make this happen, but that it’s dishonestly denying that it’s doing so.

Indeed, corporate media continues to claim that in calling for President Biden’s head it’s merely echoing what it’s hearing from voters. But that’s untrue. What it’s doing, in fact, is echoing what one component of a go-to subcommunity of sources—big donors, lawmakers, political consultants, D.C. staffers, retired Democratic politicos, and even corporate lobbyists—is saying about the current President of the United States. And it is treating its MAGA sources as relevant voices on the matter of whether a Democratic president should retire, after nine years of correctly judging it rather beside the point whether Democratic sources think Donald Trump should retire from politics and even public life. It’s presenting opinions as reporting, speculation as fact, personal bias and “what we all saw with our eyes and heard with our ears” as a homespun gospel.

So what is it, exactly, that we all saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears?

The Debate

Five things happened at Thursday’s CNN debate in Atlanta. Candidly, they were these:

1. For approximately ten minutes, the small subset of Americans who watched the debate saw the worst debate performance any U.S. politician has given since James Stockdale at the 1992 vice presidential debate. Just as Admiral Stockdale looked and sounded frail, uncertain, soft-spoken, and slightly confused in 1992—at a debate that, coincidentally, was also held in Atlanta—Biden on Thursday gave an early-debate performance that was so shocking it traumatized (and yes, that is the correct word here) a great many people who suddenly saw a Trump autocracy and the end of American democracy as inevitable, and turned off their televisions in horror. These people are still working through their trauma today, and should start naming it as such. The first ten minutes of the Atlanta debate were traumatic.

2. For the next 75 minutes after the first ten, President Biden delivered a weak performance that nevertheless easily bested his opponent on substance. Should we have expected more than we saw from either major-party political candidate on Thursday? Yes. But if you read the words President Biden actually said in the portion of the debate after the first ten minutes and before his shaky closing, you have no doubt about his mental acuity. Proof has already shown definitively that, a voice wracked by a cold and a lifelong stutter aside, President Biden was as sharp as could reasonably be expected in the face of what was undoubtedly the most sociopathic debate performance America has ever seen: a candidate for President of the United States, Donald Trump, lying an astonishing 602 times in 40 minutes and 12 seconds of speaking, an average of one lie per 3.9 seconds in the most nauseating, contemptible “Gish gallop” in the history of English-language oratory.

3. After the debate, everyone in media and politics—opting to focus only on the portion of the debate that traumatized them, while pretending (for their own shorthand purposes) that the whole debate was as bad as the first ten minutes were, which it wasn’t—agreed that Biden’s frail appearance, sotto voce delivery and a single train-of-thought dissipation wasn’t just hard to watch but actually disqualifying. In saying this, however, they also confirmed something else they now refuse to admit: that President Biden hadn’t appeared this way in the past, either in public or in private. How do we know this? Because if anyone anywhere had seen this Biden before, this performance wouldn’t have been “shocking”—as its detractors assured us it was. Everyone would have conceded that it matched more or less who the man now is either behind the scenes or at public events. But that’s not what happened. What happened is that everyone in a position to know how President Biden normally sounds indicated they were shocked by Thursday’s performance, confirming their past comments to journalists to the effect that while Joe Biden may no longer be the politician he was in 2020, he is by no means this. And did major media adopt this common-sense view of what it means to call an event “shocking”? That the very fact of President Biden’s performance being shocking means it was unprecedented? No, it did the opposite. It so passionately advocated for the retirement of the President of the United States that it began accusing itself of under-reporting a medical condition and/or mental health issue that apparently had never manifested to anyone before Thursday night. It also, to accomplish such a bizarre 7-10 split, had to (a) ignore that President Biden had a cold on Thursday, (b) ignore that his performance improved dramatically as the night went on, (c) ignore the fact that Republicans have repeatedly falsely called into question Joe Biden’s health only to be humiliated and fall to knee-slapping conspiracy-theorizing the moment they’re proven wrong (such as after President Biden’s tremendous, universally praised State of the Union address just a matter of months ago), and (d) ignore the fact that in the hours and days that followed Thursday’s debate President Biden repeatedly appeared in public and seemed just fine. By ignoring these salient facts, the media turned a ten-minute episode into the “we all know what we saw and heard for 90 minutes” lie MAGA is now hawking to try to freeze out the only Democratic politician who’s ever defeated their leader.

4. After the debate, we all “saw and heard” American voters telling major media that the debate wasn’t as bad as it was claiming. Voters tried to communicate this to major media in every way they possibly could. Nearly every post-debate focus group either split on who had won the debate, split on who its members planned to vote for after the debate, or leaned slightly in one direction or another—sometimes to Trump, and sometimes, yes, to Biden—by a margin of one raised hand. Post-debate polls showed either no change in the race, a point increase for Biden, or a point increase for Trump. The Biden campaign announced a massive post-debate fundraising haul. Social media erupted in open anger at how major media was over-emphasizing ten minutes of a single debate (and in June, no less; and with a history of political debates not mattering at all, no less; and in an era of American history in which Donald Trump has shown us that even a bad news cycle evaporates in 48 hours, no less). Videos of President Biden appearing hale and vigorous at post-debate events in Georgia, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. appeared online to confirm that major media was wildly over-reacting. But somehow none of it made a dent in the major-media coverage of what was treated as one of the most consequential disasters in modern American political history. Even considerably bigger stories like the Supreme Court anointing Mr. Trump as America’s once and future king, or more bizarrely entrancing stories like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s jets being parked beside one another for two days at an isolated area of Dulles International Airport neither jet had any good reason to be in at all, were ignored in favor of a media-wide bullrush to end the Biden era.

5. We learned, again with our eyes and ears, on the basis of who was talking to media about President Biden retiring and who was not, who was really behind the effort to cause internecine warfare inside the Democratic Party. And the answer was that moderate Democrats in swing districts perpetually afraid of losing a job in government they frankly should have seen as contingent from the jump—as they, and all politicians, would do more good work in the time they have in D.C. if they thought this way—and who have long been as afraid of Donald Trump as Mr. Trump is of exercise, expressed their pathological terror at the prospect of even a moderate Democrat like Joe Biden being effectively cast as a Marxist or Communist or fascist (does it matter which, when the people using the words don’t know their definitions?) by becoming willing accomplices in a MAGA information-warfare operation in overdrive. That any replacement for President Biden would definitionally be more liberal than he is meant nothing to these pallid careerists; the point was that they were always going to glom onto any new shiny presidential contender that had even a chance of returning better transient poll results for their own races—the future of American democracy and for that matter the Democratic Party be damned. By the same token, the donor class and the political consultant class—both famously amoral; the former want power through influence and the latter through employment, with neither having a great track record of understanding America, abiding to timeless principles, or being adept at picking winners—joined the hooting MAGA chorus only too willingly. Certainly, almost none of these latter, self-anointed wunderkind were behind Joe Biden in 2020 until he won the South Carolina Democratic primary and immediately began blowing out all his competitors. The point: major media spoke to the same people it always speaks to, which not coincidentally tend to be the most changeable and least principled voices it can find, in an effort to declare, self-aggrandizingly, that a more dramatic and as it happens more telegenic close to the Democratic primary season would be preferable. After days of corporate media browbeating voters toward its own viewpoint, it and its allies put polls into the field that offered mixed results on the Big Question that media just whistled past in order to opine, falsely, over and over, that the message is perfectly clear: Biden has to go.

Where It Goes From Here

If there’s one thing independent journalists—and for that matter, all Americans who are plugged into domestic politics—have learned from the nine years of the Trump era, it’s that major media can’t be shamed into doing its job. It will not stop using anonymous sources irresponsibly and inconsistent with best practices; it will not stop bringing on air guests it damn well knows are going to lie to its audience and spread malicious disinformation; it will not stop running as “news stories” its own anchors’ reactions to certain guests, a practice which turns non-news into pseudo-news and encourages the continued bad behavior of bringing guests on-air who’ve no business being before a microphone; it will not stop hiring dodgy far-right operatives as executives despite their history of misconduct; it will not stop pretending campaign surrogates can be treated as legitimate pundits, let alone (as they are in far too many instances) journalism-adjacent “commentators”; it will not acknowledge that the only way to cover Donald Trump responsibly is to (a) never cover him live and (b) only cover him at all when he authentically makes news by doing or saying something actually consequential (i.e., with tangible real-world effect) that he has never said before; it will not stop ignoring the work of independent journalists who’ve gotten to a story ahead of it; it will not remove ineffectual anchors or commentators it has a personal, vested interest in due to contracts, networking, or personal affection rather than their on-air performance; it will not acknowledge that social media has been a better vehicle than television for getting major breaking news to the masses in a timely fashion; it will not return to long-form investigative journalism rather than endlessly push pseudo-urgent “disaster” journalism, in which not only is everything breaking news but even the 500th mass shooting of the year is treated as newsworthy—to the point that it even edges out palpably unprecedented events being reported on virtually nowhere.

We have reached the point at which it is cliché to say that corporate media is dying and almost dead; the question, now, is what a sober look at the data tells us about the same events major media has been irresponsibly hyperbolizing for almost a week. We cannot presume that major media is going to stop its crusade against Joe Biden any more than we can fully understand what animates it—Boredom? Professional entropy? Profits? Personal bitterness? A predilection for melodrama? Some byzantine act of vengeance?—but we can take a good look at the first of the three possible outcomes of all this chaos, which stands firm no matter what corporate media has to say about it.

Standing With Biden…

As Proof has outlined, opposition to Joe Biden being the Democratic nominee has been at about 25% among Democrats for over a year now and remains at that level.

The debate in Atlanta did not appreciably change how Democrats see Joe Biden, in part because he was only awful for part of the debate; in part because there was a reasonable basis to believe—and no, this is not, as major media has been dishonestly terming it, “spin”—Biden was actually sick on Thursday; in part because he has been quite strong at his many events since he got over his cold; in part because most of those planning to vote for him, perhaps even the overwhelming majority, have been thinking of him as “old” for years now, and do not respond with shock to any major or minor confirmation of that sentiment; in part because a majority of those voting for President Biden tell pollsters their vote is primarily a vote against Donald Trump, a circumstance that makes the president’s age immaterial; in part because some voters aren’t overly concerned about President Biden falling ill or even dying while in office because they would still prefer VP Kamala Harris to Donald Trump six times a week and twice on Sunday; in part because the Republican Party now has a decade-plus history of crying wolf on the health of its political opponents (we all remember Hillary Clinton’s phantom “tumor”); in part because the country has performed so well under President Biden that it almost doesn’t matter how he’s doing accomplishing his Top 15 presidency (or even, as to certain decisions, who’s the one ultimately making them) if the outcomes are this good; in part because there are virtually no actually “undecided” voters in America anyway; in part because Mr. Trump has repeatedly been incoherent and forgetful and downright bizarre in ways that may be attributable to his advanced age, whether major media wants to admit it or not (i.e., we are seeing it with our own “eyes and ears,” even if major media hopes our eyes and ears will remain closed to it because Mr. Trump has ever been great for ratings); in part because major media has so definitively lost the trust of Americans that if major media tells us that we should be rejecting President Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee a great many of us immediately find ourselves inclined to the opposite view; in part because debates do not now matter and have never mattered; in part because many Americans either did not watch the debate at all, do not even follow national news at all, or, at the other end of the spectrum, did watch the debate but did so—unlike, apparently, many in major media—from start to finish, finding that the Biden at the end of the night was more or less the Biden they were looking for; in part because many voters value substance over style, and most voters who watched the debate appear to believe that, incredible as it may seem to major media, President Biden won the Atlanta debate on substance; in part because Mr. Trump has, in fact, no style at all, turning in last Thursday night as agonizingly contemptible a debate performance as American voters have ever seen, whether or not major media chooses to focus on that fact; in part because President Biden’s shaky performance actually built up empathy for him in many viewers of the Atlanta debate; in part because many voters vote for a political party or a presidential administration or a slate of values rather than a figurehead, making a sudden switch away from President Biden simply because he had a poor debate counterintuitive or even nonsensical; in part because polls and elections are determined ultimately by “likely” voters, not just “registered” voters, and while media outlets like CNN may now be plumping up a “Poll of Polls” that contains three registered-voter polls and only one likely-voter poll, the fact remains that Joe Biden performs the best in likely-voter polls and that those are the ones that matter (and this trend remains true in the CNN “Poll of Polls,” where Biden is in a statistical tie with Mr. Trump among likely voters even as CNN reports him down by six points across mostly registered-voter polls); in part because Americans understand, as major-media journalists don’t, that you don’t judge a man who’s been in public service for more than half a century on one day.

I could go on, but will not. Suffice to say that the churlish defensiveness we’re seeing in once-talented journalists like Jake Tapper—who along with Dana Bash served as a coin-operated question-asking robot with no other relevant duties at Thursday night’s debate—could be answered by any one of dozens of observations about how politics work, how humans think, and who President Biden is and what he’s done for America.

…and No One Else—Bar One Person—Is Even in Shouting Distance

But even more important than anything said above is the simple fact that there’s no clear reason to switch from Joe Biden to anyone else when none of the contenders to be the president’s ad hoc successor are polling any better against Donald Trump than he is, and some have barely received a fraction of the vetting President Biden and Mr. Trump have. This means that, however they may be polling now, they may just be the latest iteration of the infamous presidential candidacies of Rudy Giuliani, Herman Cain, and Ron DeSantis. Those men were all world-beating polling leaders, once, before anyone took a look at the men voters were speaking so highly of to pollsters.

Today, we can’t even say that Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Governor Gavin Newsom of California, Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, or Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania—five top contenders for the Democratic nomination in 2024, if no one from the current Democratic ticket survives whatever is coming this summer—are polling well in their pre-national-vetting state.

In fact, they’re polling the same as or worse than the man who supposedly they should be replacing because of his polling numbers. Try to make that make sense; you cannot.

Some of them have obvious fatal flaws, too, particularly in the context of a presidential campaign which would be—for them—just a matter of weeks long. No one who’s not obsessed with political journalism knows who Wes Moore or Josh Shapiro even are; at most, they know Gretchen Whitmer was the intended victim of a kidnapping plot; and of Gavin Newsom they likely only know that during the pandemic he set restrictive regulations on public gatherings and then ignored them in his personal life. They may also think, as many appear to, that he’s as slick and fake as he appears physically to be. And despite being the governor of one of America’s largest states, J.B. Pritzker’s name didn’t even appear on a list of hypothetical Democratic candidates that one recent poll revealed voters said they might consider if President Biden should throw in the towel.

Boosters of these men and women are almost certainly behind the major-media push to ditch President Biden, as nearly all major-media’s sources on this score have been anonymous, and major media no longer vets sources for truthfulness or self-interest—as evidenced by the weekly guest line-up at almost any news network in America. It is a simple enough thing for a Whitmer fan or Moore fan to tell a major-media reporter what they’ve already decided they want to hear about the President of the United States, especially if that fan is needlessly and inappropriately granted anonymity not for the sake of generating candor but (as is so much more common) for the sake of obscuring a disqualifying bias.

Most importantly, there’s no evidence as yet that any of these men or women or their supporters would treat gently with the Democratic Party and its November election chances in trying to replace President Biden; they would, rather, rip the Democratic Party to shreds this summer—and with it American democracy—if doing so would earn them just one more delegate in a Democratic National Convention floor fight.

But putting aside their relative anonymity, their flatlined polling, their lack of vetting, and the fact that even considering any of them would lead to a Democratic bloodbath the party wouldn’t likely recover from this year, these underwhelming alternatives all have another piece of significant baggage attached to them: they’ve virtually no cash.

All Biden-Harris campaign monies must stay with either Biden or Harris or both, so if the Democratic Party has any hope of competing with Donald Trump’s small-donors-bankrupting-themselves-to-pay-his-legal-fees-and-maybe-a-few-election-expenses pipeline this summer and fall, Kamala Harris must remain on the ticket. So how, then, would a last-minute switcheroo work, exactly? Is the Democratic Party, in 2024, going to have a white man with little name recognition nationally (Mssrs. Newsom, Pritzker, or Shapiro) leapfrog over a Black woman? And this is putting aside the fact that two of those men are Jews—a tough identity to carry, even inside the Democratic Party, as a Jewish state in the Middle East commits ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide in one of Earth’s two current front-page wars. For that matter, would it be any better if Democrats elevated a Black man with zero name recognition—Wes Moore—over the sitting VP? How would women voters respond to that not-so-inconspicuous slight?

No. It’s all unthinkable. As respected a Democratic seer as Donna Brazile has already gone public with the notion that it’s unthinkable. So if Harris is going to stay on the ticket, she needs to be atop it; and if she’s going to be atop it, she and not anyone else is going to have first say on who runs alongside her—so there won’t be a bloody floor fight at the convention in Chicago on the matter (nor would there need to be, given that the VP slot matters little, and is more a horse-race aimed at producing profits for cable-news outlets than anything American voters are organically much invested in).

So it has to be Kamala Harris, right? The slightly weird, seemingly competent but also oddly charisma-free VP who’s largely disappeared—I mean this literally—into the role since she acquired it after a lackluster 2020 presidential campaign. The Kamala Harris who American voters have repeatedly made clear in actual voting, not just in polls, that they don’t particularly like. The one so detested by the MAGAs that she’s used as a bogeyman to scare up small donations—and used in this way successfully. The one who MAGAs were using as a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) instrument even before the Atlanta debate. That Kamala Harris is going to be the new nominee? The Harris who, in every poll, either polls no better than President Biden against Donald Trump or else polls better but still within the margin of error? For Kamala Harris, the Democrats will toss overboard a sitting President of the United States for the first time since the 1960s?

Certainly, it’s not impossible to imagine some other liminal scenarios—and indeed we must, as even putting aside the possible forcible “pasturing” of President Biden, there remains the chance that he suffers from some sort of medical incident between now and November (not that, besides moving slow, there appears to be any major physical ailments on his medical chart) and has to be replaced by someone.

For instance, could we imagine the Bidens and Harrises sitting down in a room—just the four of them, mind you, with no one else present at all—and agreeing to run an administration campaign, i.e. one in which the focus of the argument for re-election is the accomplishments of the entire administration and not any one person within it, under which aegis a plausible narrative could be advance that anyone now inside the administration can be chosen to run alongside Harris (who would have to stay on the ticket for continuity, her experience inside the White House and administration, and her access to the Biden-Harris campaign war chest) even if that person ascends past VP Harris to the top of the ticket? Yes, we can imagine it, and perhaps we must.

Consider this data:

That’s right: the only Biden alternative who leads all others in every state (with the sole exception of a state in which he’s second to the state’s current governor) is Joe Biden Cabinet member Pete Buttigieg, who unlike Kamala Harris ran a strong presidential campaign in 2020, as Secretary of Transportation has probably been more in the news—if not always for ideal reasons—than the Vice President has, and who’d be (as Harris would) a historic candidate as the first openly gay man atop a major presidential ticket.

On the other hand, Buttigieg has fared poorly with Black voters—a fact that might be mollified somewhat if he’s running alongside a Black woman—and transportation issues, though admittedly not ones of Secretary Buttigieg’s making, have plagued the United States over the last two years. They could easily act as an albatross around the Secretary’s neck. So why would he be considered at all? Because he’s the smartest and most articulate and most values-forward Democrat in the United States right now this side of Barack Obama, because he has never lost any debate he’s been in and many independent voters swear by him, because he’s young as hell, because his life story is absolutely fascinating, because he’s from the Midwest rather than the East or West coast, and because, again, he seems to poll well—unlike Harris. Finally, as noted, he’s not some outside governor looking to barge into Washington on the implicit promise of pushing aside the Biden Legacy; rather, he’s very much a continuation of that legacy, having been handpicked by the President of the United States to be one of his leading advisers.

A Buttigieg-Harris ticket would be a “Biden administration” ticket that could run as exactly that and not some bizarre, eleventh-hour-replacement circus sideshow. But the fact remains that a Buttigieg candidacy would technically pass over Kamala Harris and would be unacceptable, for that reason, for certain women voters and for certain Black voters—two Democratic demographics that form the very backbone of the party.

Drafting Michelle

If I told you that every conceivable Democratic replacement for President Joe Biden is running between two and six points behind Donald Trump right now, but that there is one person who runs eleven points ahead of Trump, would you even believe me? Is a lead like that possible in the United States in this century? It seems utterly unthinkable.

But that’s indeed the lead Michelle Obama has on Donald Trump right now.

Michelle Obama, who’d be a continuation of the Obama-Biden Legacy in every sense.

Michelle Obama, a Black woman who could leapfrog Kamala Harris without incident.

Michelle Obama, whose candidacy would be a historic one in too many ways to count.

Michelle Obama, one-half a husband-wife duo we know drives Trump to derangement.

Michelle Obama, who is loved by foreign leaders and well known in Washington.

Michelle Obama, a non-politician who can run as the “outsider” Trump says he is.

Michelle Obama, who could be picked to replace Joe Biden without a party bloodbath.

Michelle Obama, a celebrity beloved by men and women of every political stripe.

Michelle Obama—someone who has publicly sworn never to run for the presidency.

Which raises the question: do the Obamas actually believe that democracy is peril? Surely they do. So putting aside the question of whether Michelle Obama would put herself forward for the presidency—no, she will not; she never has and never will, as she authentically detests (and with very good reason) American politics—what would she do if delegates from every state in the Union choose to stand up in her hometown of Chicago this summer and cry out in admiration and desperation and fear and hope and anxiety and bewilderment and joy for her to accept a role she does not want for the sake of saving her country? What story could he more romantic? What narrative could make for better television? What story would more derange Donald Trump, sending him into the fits of self-defeating racism and misogyny and conspiracy-theorizing he falls into whenever either of the Obamas is even mentioned to him? And more than any of this, what sort of person could resist such a cri de coeur from her entire homeland?

Michelle Obama is a magnificent human being. It’s hard to imagine her saying no to the raised voice of every American who loves democracy calling out to her for her aid.

But let’s put aside the poetry of such a scenario and consider its nuts-and-bolts sense, which of course is worth considering only if (a) President Biden has a medical or other incident that forces him from the presidential race; (b) his family changes its mind about urging him to continue running, and instead urges him to retire now (a plea it is generally thought he would accede to if ever it manifests); (c) his polls so crater that he fears running will destroy his historical legacy and his place in American history; (d) his polls so crater that his party openly turns against him, not just in terms of leaders in D.C. but—worse—the voters he’s had such a special relationship with for decades.

With all that in mind, consider the following:

(1) Donald Trump has created significant safety threats for Michelle Obama, her husband, and her family, in addition to being an unrepentant racist. If Michelle Obama runs in 2024, it’s not simply for the sake of running for a position she doesn’t particularly care about, and it’s not even just running for the sake of saving America, but doing so in opposition to a man we must presume she detests more than any other. I say this not to diminish Michelle Obama’s wisdom or patriotism, but rather to note that, when we’re speaking of a non-politician who detests politics, it likely requires something more than trying to drum up—say—an animus for a GOP pol like Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) or Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) that Michelle Obama likely does not feel to get her to run for President of the United States. There’s some reason to think having a personal stake in the outcome of this race would be compelling to any person who has the distaste for politics Michelle Obama has, and who has been wounded by this particular Republican Party politician in the way she and her entire family have.

(2) Michelle Obama does not have to commit to running for re-election. The goal of Michelle Obama running for president would simply be to allow the criminal cases against Donald Trump to run their course before Americans have to make a decision about him at the polls—as we should all understand that Donald Trump is running for president again in 2028 if he’s still alive and not in prison at that point (and to be clear, no one can stop him from doing so and no one will stop him from doing so). As importantly, Michelle Obama being a reluctant candidate, and therefore having no interest in reelection, would reassure all the current Democratic contenders noted above—i.e., those not named Biden or Harris—that they will only have to wait the amount of time they already anticipated waiting until they themselves can run for president. None of them planned to have access to the White House before 2028.

(3) Any conventional Democratic politician who replaces Joe Biden must run as a conventional politician—a handicap Donald Trump has never been saddled with. Why was Trump permitted to repeatedly skip debates? Because he was deemed something other than a politician, and therefore outside the rules. Of all the people who could replace Joe Biden, the only one who could flatly refuse to debate Donald Trump on the grounds that (say) she simply doesn’t feel like being in the same room with him or see any benefit to hearing what he has to say would be Michelle Obama. The only one who could make her own schedule for the entirety of the campaign, and make idiosyncratic decisions about what events to do and what outlets to speak with, would be Michelle Obama. And that’s a good thing, too, as the fact that she would be a reluctant candidate would offer sufficient cover for the fact that she’s never wanted to run a political campaign at all and certainly not a conventional one. So if she makes gaffes, she has some plausible cover for same; if she bucks certain trends, likewise. And if she indeed has an eleven-point lead on Donald Trump despite having already been vetted thoroughly by American voters, she’s unlikely to do much now that so shocks the sensibilities of voters that it can eat into her lead on Trump sufficiently to cost her the election.

(4) Because the Democrats have an abnormally late convention this year, the pitch they can make to Michelle Obama is that she’ll be able to run the shortest campaign in history. The Democrats certainly would be wise to force Trump to pick his vice presidential candidate without knowing who he’ll be running against, just as they would be wise—if they’re going to pick a non-politician—to have the official launch of that person’s campaign not only be one of the most watched events in American history, but more importantly an event that takes place perhaps only ten weeks before election day: in other words, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (which is likely where it would have to happen, in any case, as it would only occur against Michelle Obama’s wishes and by a vote of the delegates present). It is useful to the Democrats to shorten this election as much as possible, as it may take time for Republicans to figure out how to run against Mrs. Obama, especially if she runs an unconventional campaign. And she’d almost certainly insist on doing so, and wisely so.

(5) For whatever reason, some Americans have nostalgia for the Trump era—yet it surely pales in comparison to nostalgia independent voters have for the Obama era. A Michelle Obama candidacy would hearken back to the last time Americans felt there was any stability in our national ecosystem. Nor would this nostalgia be an empty one, as of course a still young and hale Barack Obama—he’s about twenty years younger than the sitting president—would in actual fact be back in the White House. (Even if I’m not going to say something as silly and condescending as that a Michelle Obama presidency would see American voters getting “two leaders for the price of one.” It would not be that; Michelle Obama would be the president, full stop. But the optics of the two Obamas together in D.C. would certainly stoke nostalgia for the Obama years.)

(6) Everyone agrees Kamala Harris has to remain on the 2024 ticket so that all the accumulated Biden-Harris money—and it’s a lot—remains with the campaign. So either Kamala Harris is going to be the vice presidential candidate or she is going to be the presidential candidate, and as noted above the problem with making her the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in 2024 is that voters generally don’t seem to like her. I’ve already observed that there’s still a problem with making her the vice presidential candidate—as most of the options to leapfrog her on the ticket are white politicians, and that could quite understandably alienate Black voters and even (if any of Newsom, Pritzker, Buttigieg, Moore, or Shapiro were picked) women as well. One solution to that big problem? Ensure that the person self-admittedly leapfrogging Harris is not only another woman of color, not only a non-politician who can’t readily be compared alongside Harris in the way other contenders could be, but someone who so clearly leads Donald Trump in polling that Harris and other Democratic contenders would basically have no argument to make that they’re better suited to take the place of Joe Biden on the ticket. Indeed, if Michelle Obama privately expresses an interest in only being president for four years, VP Harris might prefer her to the present, rather dire scenario, which increasingly seems like a possible loss (and the probable end, then, of Harris’s own political career) with the Democratic ticket as it currently stands.

(7) A 2024 Obama-Harris ticket is quite literally a symbolic combination of the joint achievements of the Obama administration and the Biden administration, allowing the Democratic Party to run a presidential campaign that’s not so much about personalities but about two stable and successful presidential administrations sandwiched on either side of four years of corruption, scandal, and incompetence. It’s a comparison the Democratic ticket would likely make early and often. Another way of putting this is that Joe Biden would almost certainly be willing to give way to Michelle Obama because he’s always seen himself as being in partnership with the Obamas; because he wouldn’t be getting replaced by another politician (which sort of replacement, I think, would wound his pride); and because he sees himself as part of the “Obama-Biden Legacy” rather than just the Biden Legacy—so Michelle Obama is as a matter of ideology in his camp and a part of his story even more than Harris is.

(8) The Democrats do not have to convince Michelle Obama to take the position—they merely have to put her in a position in which she can’t say no. In other words, her earnest trepidation may, in point of fact, be beside the point. It’s considerably better for a future Michelle Obama campaign if it is clear to American voters that she made no effort to cause her candidacy to happen and in fact did not want it to happen. There’s something inspiring about a reluctant politician who only became a candidate because her country literally came calling at the eleventh hour in a dramatic, televised moment at a national political convention—an event at which representatives of all 50 states stood up one after another and begged her to save our democratic republic. The biggest GOTV angle MAGA has had historically with respect to the Obamas, at least rhetorically, is the (false) claim that they’re inveterate schemers with a secret agenda. But in this instance, every American would have seen that Joe Biden stepped back from his campaign due to health issues that the Obamas had nothing at all to do with; every American would have seen that Michelle Obama continued to refuse to run until the very moment she was nominated by representatives from all 50 states; every American would have heard the years of statements from her and her representatives indicating that she truly is contemptuous of American politics. So GOTV for the Republicans would likely be much harder in this election cycle than they’re currently expecting.

Conclusion

Thank God Michelle Obama is contemptuous of American politics—because so are most Americans.

What Michelle Obama would offer America right now, if she’s called to serve against her will—though with the prior tacit approval of the sitting President of the United States—is the sort of contempt for U.S. politics that’s diametrically opposed to the one we see daily from Donald Trump. Whereas Donald Trump came to American politics from a place of anger and bitterness and warlike aggression, Michelle Obama would be able to unabashedly run as someone who thinks politics should be a higher calling—but currently isn’t. She would present as, and would in fact be, someone who wants to reinvigorate public service with a sense of honor, integrity, and duty. And she’d be able to make this argument not as a poll-tested, focus-group automaton programmed to appear as noble, but through organic attitudes she’s natively held regarding politics for years. Because of her many interviews of her internationally bestselling memoir, many American voters are already aware of these views and their authenticity. That is to say, this is an chance for Michelle Obama to run as herself and say all the things she really believes about our broken political system.

Barack Obama was a great president, and surely no one has any cause to say that he “owes” America anything. He may, however, be mindful of the fact that resentment toward his presidency sadly helped fuel Trumpism, and that in even more explicit terms Trump fueled his own rise to political prominence by attacking Obama and his administration. Obama responded to all this by picking Hillary Clinton over his own vice president as his successor, and we all now know how that turned out. While no one has any illusions that Barack Obama is particularly interested in getting back into politics—indeed, it’s clear that his life plan more or less involves avoiding politics as much as he can—just as Michelle Obama would be returning to politics to deal with a man who personally went after her family, Barack Obama coming back into politics in a significant way would give him the sort of second chance most people don’t get in several lifetimes: a second shot at doing something extraordinary that you didn’t quite manage to do as you wanted the first time—in this case passing on the Obama-Biden administration “torch” to the first woman president in the history of the United States.

Journalists get no sense from Mrs. Obama that she values fame or glory whatsoever, which is to her credit. It must be noted, however, that if she becomes the first woman president in the history of the United states, and if she does so by defeating a racist would-be tyrant who aims to destroy American democracy, she would instantly be held up as the most famous American woman who ever lived—and probably remain that in perpetuity. Self-evidently, that’s really saying something, as many millions and millions of American women have made staggeringly important contributions to the evolution of our nation. But a President Michelle Obama would almost certainly top all their accomplishments, not merely by achieving a status no other woman has in U.S. history, but by doing so at a time America was on the brink of actual destruction. It’s a High Fantasy come to life, and it’s hard to imagine most Americans wouldn’t get swept up in it. In fact, one imagines that the reason Michelle Obama is leading Trump by a jaw-dropping eleven points right now is that independent voters already see in her hypothetical candidacy not just a person but an idea, an ideal, and a narrative worth supporting.

One of the biggest pieces of baggage any existing Democratic contender who hopes to replace Joe Biden would have is their own obscurity. As already noted, no one really knows who J.B. Pritzker or Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom are, and coming into the campaign so late these contenders wouldn’t have much of a chance to introduce themselves to voters. While obviously people know who Kamala Harris is, that cuts against her topping the ticket in 2024—again, as already noted—as does the Boeing Scandal with respect to Pete Buttigieg, who had nothing to do with it but could likely be easily blamed for “bad transportation news” inside the United States this decade. (It might also be too easy to imply that Buttigieg’s role in the Biden Administration is his first big job, and that it hasn’t gone as smoothly as it might have—whether it’s his fault or not.)

By comparison, Michelle Obama wrote one of the most successful books in American history about her life, and it has been read by so many people that it’s impossible to feel like America doesn’t know her, even as it also has no political missteps of great significance to judge her harshly by. In a short campaign, the difficulty Republicans would have in redefining Michelle Obama enough to overcome an eleven-point deficit starting in—presumably—late August might be prohibitive. It’s likely too steep a hill.

The fact that Donald Trump is a racist and a misogynist who is specifically suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome, as you may have noticed that he gets extremely weird and unhinged whenever he’s talking about the Obamas or anything related to the Obamas, would be a bear trap beneath his shoe for the whole presidential campaign.

At any moment, we could expect Trump to say something racist or misogynistic that would blow up in his face and cause independent voters to permanently turn away from him (as much as they already should have done so). On the other hand, Michelle Obama is most famous for saying “When they go low, we go high”, which gives her license to do the one thing that infuriates Trump the most: ignore his silly outbursts.

We must understand that an Obama-Trump tilt in 2024 would be like no other POTUS election cycle we have ever seen, inasmuch as it’s entirely possible Michelle Obama would rarely if ever mention Mr. Trump by name—opting instead to simply outline a broad vision of what she thinks America is capable of being. While her fluency in policy is probably limited, she also appears to share the core values of her husband (and for that matter, President Biden) sufficiently that her answers to any questions about policy would more or less be the same ones the Obama administration and the Biden administration have been giving since 2008. In other words, if she wishes it, she’s inheriting a policy portfolio that she can more or less adopt as her own rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and establish a political identity out of whole cloth.

Many of you have noticed that Melania Trump is basically undergoing an open-air “low-key divorce” from her husband. She’s never seen with him, and appears to have no interest in being seen with him. This fact would make it even more powerful if the Democratic candidate not only had a spouse who was and is a highly public figure; not only has a spouse who was and is admired around the world; but has a spouse who may be one of the most famous people in modern human history. Think about it for a moment: Democrats would have, with a Michelle Obama candidacy, a sitting POTUS out on the campaign trail in 2024; a former president on the campaign trail; the sitting vice president on the campaign trail, and a former First Lady (and current presidential nominee) on the campaign trail, even as Donald Trump would appear alone at events and be almost certain to pick a vice presidential candidate who precisely no one cares or is excited about (at last reporting, his VP will be either the nearly anonymous Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota; a man Trump has detested for years, that being “Little” Marco Rubio; or Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, a less polished MAGA con man and therefore no more than a literal duplication of the entity already atop the MAGA ticket). All the star power in 2024 would be on the Democratic side, which is just the opposite of how Donald Trump likes it—and exactly the opposite of how things have been with President Biden and VP Harris sitting atop the Democratic ticket right now.

Many reading this will know that Joe Biden is a great fundraiser. We should assume that Michelle Obama, running to be the first woman president in the history of the United States, would be the greatest fundraiser American politics has ever seen.

And because Michelle Obama isn’t a politician but an international celebrity, there’s the possibility that her involvement in the 2024 race would get people involved in it who heretofore have been on the sidelines. Everyone from famous intellectuals and businesspeople to athletes and celebrities, from wealthy persons who maybe haven’t been major donors to any political campaign in the past—but would see this moment in American history as the perfect time to change that—to the sort of American who’s likely to read the biography of a famous woman like Michelle Obama but not actually vote in a national election unless (voila!) that very woman happens to be on the ballot.

Michelle Obama knows most major world leaders personally, and while obviously none would endorse her openly, surely when asked about her they would all speak earnestly about how much they respect her. The implicit comparison to Trump would be obvious—and diffuse his false claim that America isn’t respected by world leaders.

Domestic political leaders would be energized by a Michelle Obama candidacy as well. We can readily imagine the newly active involvement (say) of Bill Clinton and even Hillary Clinton in the 2024 Democratic campaign, should the Obamas be back at the center of American politics. Indeed, we can well imagine that Michelle Obama would seek to bring more women into her cabinet than have ever served in a cabinet, perhaps even including Mrs. Clinton herself. (Why do I mention this? Because, as I know from writing books on the subject, there may be no person on Earth Vladimir Putin more reviles and fears than Hillary Clinton; yes—really. The return of Hillary Clinton to a diplomatic post would be a stunning statement of support for Ukraine and opposition to Russian expansionism. While I don’t suggest that Michelle Obama would in any way forecast beforehand who would be part of her cabinet, it does seem reasonable to note that a nontraditional presidential candidate has room to build a nontraditional cabinet—and that itself is an exciting prospect some voters might vote for simply as part of an “I want to see what happens next” mindset, which oddly is the same sentiment that fueled Donald Trump’s surprising meteoric rise back in 2016.)

Assuming that the sizable contingent inside the Democratic Party that still supports President Biden—which includes Proof—is unable to withstand the joint onslaught of major media, MAGA influencer-raconteur-trolls, milquetoast centrists, self-interested borderline politicians, and Washington’s chattering class of campaign staffers and sad political consultants-come-grifters, one of the few things that would truly change the dynamics of the 2024 U.S. presidential election would be for the Democratic Party to finally understand that this is an “all-hands-on-deck” moment. Mrs. Obama running for president when she doesn’t wish to would be the very embodiment of an all-hands-on-deck moment for the United States—and perhaps even for the entire world.